A RALLY, probably the result of a gift from Manchester, came about
in the latter half of February 1887. I quote his own words: "With a
few shillings to give me breathing space, I began to decipher and
put together the half-obliterated manuscript of 'Paganism.' I came
simultaneously to my last page and my last halfpenny; and went forth to
drop the MS. in the letter-box of _Merry England_.[15] Next day I spent
the halfpenny on two boxes of matches, and began the struggle for life."
This was the covering letter to my father, its editor:--
"_Feb. 23rd, '87._--Dear Sir,--In enclosing the
accompanying article for your inspection I must ask
pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is
due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places
and circumstances under which it has been written.
For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse
experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped
envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return
of the manuscript, regarding your judgment of its
worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect
that where my prose fails my verse will succeed.
Nevertheless, on the principle of 'Yet will I try the
last,' I have added a few specimens of it, with the
off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
Apologising very sincerely for any intrusion on your
valuable time, I remain yours with little hope,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post
Office."
Francis had more than remembered the existence of the magazine and its
editor. "I was myself virtually his pupil and his wife's long before
I knew him. He has in my opinion--an opinion of long standing--done
more than any man in these latter days to educate Catholic literary
opinion," he wrote to Manchester soon after his first appearance in the
magazine. He knew the target at which he aimed.
"Paganism Old and New" is written in the unharassed manner of a man
whose style, and cuffs, had been kept in order at the Savile Club.
But he had no backing of library and chef to give him the courage
of his fine sentences; he was the man selling matches in the gutter
and sharpening his pencil on the kerb-stone. The beauty of the
circumstances of Pagan life, its processional maidens, "shaking a most
divine dance from their feet," its theatres unroofed to the smokeless
sky--with these, he says, the advocates of a revived Paganism contrast
the conditions of to-day: "the cold formalities of an outworn worship;
our _ne plus ultra_ of pageantry, a Lord Mayor's show; the dryadless
woods regarded chiefly as potential timber; the grimy streets, the
grimy air, the disfiguring statues, the Stygian crowd; the temple to
the reigning goddess Gelasma, which mocks the name of theatre; last
and worst, the fatal degradation of popular perception which has gazed
so long on ugliness that it takes her to its bosom. In our capitals
the very heavens have lost their innocence. Aurora may rise over our
cities, but she has forgotten how to blush." From the pavement where
the East sweeps the soot in eddies round his ankles, he protests:
"Pagan Paganism was not poetical. No pagan eye ever visioned the nymphs
of Shelley." "In the name of all the Muses, what treason against Love
and Beauty!" he cries against Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid, for the
arid eroticism that was satisfied to write of love without tribute to
the colour of a lady's eyes. For contrast, he quotes Rossetti's--
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
Wordsworth's "Eyes like stars of twilight fair"; Collins's Pity "with
eyes of dewy light"; Shelley's "Thy sweet-child sleep, the filmy-eyed."
And of the fair love of Dante and other Christian poets he makes sweet
and loyal praises. He was the lover to write an essay in defence of
the social order that denied him love, sleep, pity, and the eyes of
any lady. It was the essay, too, of a man physically hungry. He supped
full, but with fancies.
* * * * *
Thompson's manuscripts, most uninviting in outward aspect, were
pigeon-holed, unread by a much-occupied editor for six months--were
then released, read, and estimated at their worth. The sanity of the
essay was proof enough of the genius of Thompson's inspiration against
the evidence in some of the poems of another inspiration--that of
drugs. My father and mother (the A. M. and W. M. of following pages)
decided to accept the essay and a poem, and to seek the author. To this
end my father wrote a letter addressed to Charing Cross Post Office,
stating the intention of printing some of the manuscript, and asking
Francis to call for a proof and to discuss the chances of future work.
To that letter came no reply and publication was postponed, but when at
last his letter was returned through the dead-letter office, he printed
the "Passion of Mary" as the best way of getting into communication
with the author. The poem appeared in _Merry England_ for April 1888,
and on the 14th my father received the following letter:--
"_April 14th, 1888._--DEAR SIR,--In the last days of
February or the first days of March, 1887 (my memory
fails me as to the exact date), I forwarded to you
for your magazine a prose article, "Paganism Old and
New" (or "Ancient and Modern," for I forget which
wording I adopted), and accompanied it by some pieces
of verse, on the chance that if the prose failed,
some of the verse might meet acceptance. I enclosed a
stamped envelope for a reply, since (as I said) I did
not desire the return of the manuscript. Imprudently,
perhaps, instead of forwarding the parcel through the
post, I dropped it with my own hand into the letter-box
of 43 Essex Street. There was consequently no stamp on
it, since I did not think a stamp would be necessary
under the circumstances. I asked you to address your
answer to the Charing Cross Post Office. To be brief,
from that day to this, no answer has ever come into
my hands. And yet, more than a twelve-month since
the forwarding of the manuscript, I am now informed
that one of the copies of verse which I submitted
to you (_i.e._ 'The Passion of Mary') is appearing
in this month's issue of _Merry England_. Such an
occurrence I can only explain to myself in one way,
viz., that some untoward accident cut off your means of
communicating with me. To suppose otherwise--to suppose
it intentional--would be to wrong your known honour
and courtesy. I have no doubt that your explanation,
when I receive it, will be entirely satisfactory to me.
I therefore enclose a stamped and addressed envelope
for an answer, hoping that you will recompense me for
my long delay by the favour of an early reply. In any
case, however long circumstances may possibly delay
your reply, it will be sure of reaching me at the
address I have now given.--I remain, yours faithfully,
FRANCIS JOSEPH THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--Doubtless, when I received no answer, I
ought to have written again. My excuse must be that a
flood-tide of misfortune rolled over me, leaving me no
leisure to occupy myself with what I regarded as an
attempt that had hopelessly failed. Hence my entire
subsequent silence."
To this my father answered with an explanation and a repetition of his
invitation to Francis to arrange for regular work, and despatched his
answer by a special messenger to the address given, a chemist's shop in
Drury Lane. The chemist's manner of accepting responsibility for the
safe delivery of the letter was discouraging. He said that Thompson
sometimes called for letters, but that he knew little of him. After
a few days during which nothing was heard my father went himself in
search. His obvious eagerness prompted a query from the man behind the
counter: "Are you a relative? he owes me three-and-ninepence." With
that paid and a promise of ten-and-sixpence if he produced the poet, he
agreed to do his best, and, many days after, my father, being in his
workroom, was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him. "Show him up,"
he said, and was left alone.
Then the door opened, and a strange hand was thrust in. The door
closed, but Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, again it shut.
At the third attempt a waif of a man came in. No such figure had been
looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no
shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my
father at a loss for words. "You must have had access to many books
when you wrote that essay," was what he said. "That," said Thompson,
his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that afterwards became one
of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented mannerisms, "that
is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books by me at the time
save Aeschylus and Blake." There was little to be done for him at
that interview save the extraction of a promise to call again. He made
none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking sympathy and
alms. He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans for his benefit,
and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would enable him to
sleep in a bed and sit at a table. I know of no man, and can imagine
none, to whom another can so easily unburden himself of uneasiness and
formalities as to my father. To him the poor and the rich are, as the
fishes and the flames to St. Francis, his brothers and his friends at
sight, even if these are shy as fishes and sightless as flame. But the
impression of the visit on my father was of a meeting that did not
end in great usefulness--so much was indicated by a manner schooled
in concealments. But Francis came again, and again, and then to my
father's house in Kensington. Of the falsity of the impression given by
his manner, his poetry in the address to his host's little girl is the
proof:--
Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love!
Upon the ending of my deadly night
(Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight
Is all that any mortal knows thereof),
Thou wert to me that earnest of day's light,
When, like the back of a gold-mailéd saurian
Heaving its slow length from Nilotic slime,
The first long gleaming fissure runs Aurorian
Athwart the yet dun firmament of prime.
Stretched on the margin of the cruel sea
Whence they had rescued me,
With faint and painful pulses was I lying;
Not yet discerning well
If I had 'scaped, or were an icicle,
Whose thawing is its dying.
Like one who sweats before a despot's gate,
Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate,
And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait;
And all so sickened is his countenance
The courtiers buzz, "Lo, doomed!" and look at him askance:--
At fate's dread portal then
Even so stood I, I ken,
Even so stood I, between a joy and fear,
And said to mine own heart, "Now, if the end be here!"
In the last four lines is probably an instance of his habitual
appropriation of things seen for his poetic images. If the door of my
father's room is here promoted to a part in _Sister Songs_, it takes
its place with the clock of Covent Garden, the arrowy minute-hand
of which Mr. Shane Leslie has remarked as suggesting Thompson's
description of himself when he
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me.
In the continuation of the same passage is found another example:--
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheeléd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Even before he was knocked down by a cab, as happened to him later, the
heavy traffic of Covent Garden, harassing the straggler in the gutter,
may well have been to him a type of danger and fears.
* * * * *
The idea of rescue came slowly and doubtfully to Francis, who was
far less ready than my father to believe that he was fitted for the
writing career. Their first talks were of books; of his history he
said nothing. He was willing to tell of the poets he had read in the
Guildhall Library, until the police, being, as he said, against him,
barred the entrance. He was willing, too, that anything he had written
should be published, and bring temporary wealth; but reluctant to
admit that he might become a worker and quit the streets--so fixedly
reluctant that some strong reason was conjectured. He would visit my
father, then living in Kensington, but it was long before he would
accept substantial hospitalities; coming in the evening or afternoon,
he would leave to return to his calling--literally a calling--of cabs.
That he was also during this time either parting with or searching
for his Ann is not unlikely. He took his reprieve as he had taken
his doom; he went frightened and brave at once, at war with peace,
at peace with war. With his hesitations, it was more than six months
later that he wrote anew for _Merry England_, in the November issue of
which appeared "Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism"; his three
previous appearances, in April, May, and June, with the "Passion of
Mary," "Dream Tryst," and "Paganism Old and New," having exhausted the
possible things among those first submitted. He was not an absentee
because he could not write better than the oldest hand the articles
exactly fitted for _Merry England_. The intention declared in an early
number of my father's magazine was to give voice to a renascence of
happiness; "We shall try to revive in our own hearts, and in the hearts
of others, the enthusiasm of the Christian Faith." This enthusiasm
was to inform essays on social problems and essays in literary and
artistic criticism, and an optimistic editor had told his contributors
to recover the humour, and good humour, of the Saints and Fathers.
"Paganism Old and New," in which it was sought to expose the fallacy of
searching for love of beauty and sweetness in the pagan mythology, and
to reveal the essential modernity, and even Christianity, of Keats' and
Shelley's pagan beauties, was a triumph of journalistic obedience and
appropriateness.
It ends: "Bring back even the best age of Paganism, and you smite
beauty on the cheek. But you _cannot_ bring back then, the best age of
Paganism, the age when Paganism was a faith. None will again behold
Apollo in the forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper
air loose the long lustre of her golden locks. But _you may_ bring
back--_dii avertant omen_--the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and
Statius, and Juvenal. . . . This is the Paganism which is formidable,
and not the antique lamp whose feeding oil is spent, whose light has
not outlasted the damps of its long sepulture." This he wrote, who
might have been exercising his knowledge of ignominy in a _Ventre de
Londres_ or at least in such a book as the memorable _Rowton House
Rhymes_.
The streets, somehow, had nurtured a poet and trained a journalist.
He had gone down into poverty so absolute that he was often without
pen and paper, and now emerged a pressman. Neither his happiness,
nor his tenderness, nor his sensibility had been marred, like his
constitution, by his experiences. To be the target of such pains as it
is the habit of the world to deplore as the extreme of disaster, and
yet to keep alive the young flame of his poetry; to be under compulsion
to watch the ignominies of the town, and yet never to be nor to think
himself ignominious; to establish the certitude of his virtue; to keep
flourishing an infinite tenderness and capability for delicacies and
_gentilezze_ of love--these were the triumphs of his immunity. A mother
not yet delivered of her child must be protected from all ills of mind
and body lest they do injury to the delicate and susceptible life
within her. Horrors must not be spoken in her presence; it has been
held fit that she should have pictures about her bed of fair infants
that her thoughts might instruct the features of the unborn child
in good-favouredness. How otherwise was the poet dealt with, whose
intellect was the womb of the word! The making of Viola, as he tells
it, is a sweeter business than the making of a poet--of the maker of
a "Making of Viola"--but not more natural and inevitable. Thompson's
muse rose intact, but trailing bloody insignia of battle; his spirit
rose from the penal waters fresh as Botticelli's Venus. It had not been
more marvellous if Sandro's lady, with cool cheeks, floating draperies,
and dry curls, had risen from a real unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,
instead of from the silly ripples of Florentine convention.
But physically he was battered; and his condition led my father to
prevail upon him, with much difficulty, to be examined by a doctor. "He
will not live," was the first verdict, "and you hasten his death by
denying his whims and opium." But the risk was taken, and Francis sent
to a private hospital.
Thus he alludes to the change within himself:--"Please accept my
warmest thanks for all your kindness and trouble on my behalf. I know
this is a very perfunctory looking letter; but until the first sharp
struggle is over, it is difficult for me to write in any other way."
De Quincey thought that opium killed Coleridge as a poet, that it was
the enemy of his authorship; that the leaving off of opium creates a
new heaven and a new earth. Thompson had now to experience such things
by the denial of the drug. Of his links with Coleridge A. M. writes in
the _Dublin Review_, January 1908:--
"Of his alienation from ordinary life, laudanum was
the sole cause, and, of laudanum, early and long
disease. Coleridge's fault was Thompson's--an evasion
of the daily dues of man to man. It was laudanum that
dissolved Coleridge's bond to wife and child, and piled
their unanswered letters by his bed of illusion and
shattering dreams; it was laudanum that held the hand
bound to open them, turning it half callous and half
timorous, as though insensibility should borrow of
sensibility its flight, its cowardice, and its closed
eyes; or rather the sensitive and loving man was acting
his own part, wearing a delusive likeness to himself,
while laudanum cared nothing for wife or child. It was
laudanum that sent Coleridge to take refuge on one
alien hearth when no fire was kindled to welcome him in
any home of his kindred. It was laudanum that was the
unspoken thing, the unnamed, in Coleridge's conscious
talk; other things he would confess, but not this,
which was the daily desire, the daily possession, and
the daily stealth. So it was also, in his own degree,
with this later sufferer. Francis Thompson was not like
Coleridge; he had not Coleridge's bond and obligations;
but the laudanum was alike in the wronged veins, the
altered blood, of both."
The renunciation of opium, not its indulgence, opened the doors of the
intellect. Opium killed the poet in Coleridge; the opium habit was
stifled at the birth of the poet in Thompson. His images came toppling
about his thoughts overflowingly during the pains of abstinence. This,
too, was de Quincey's experience, told when he was unwinding "the
accursed chain": "I protest to you I have a greater influx of thoughts
in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium.
It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up for a
decade of years by opium had now, according to the old fable, been
thawed at once."
"The Ode to the Setting Sun" was written at midsummer in 1889, and on
receiving it, his editor, with my mother and a young friend, Mr. Vernon
Blackburn, straightway took the train to congratulate him on this first
conclusive sign of the splendour of his powers. For the poet had been
placed with the monks at Storrington Priory, and it was the music of
three wandering musicians heard in the village street that opened the
ode[16]:--
The wailful sweetness of the violin
Floats down the hushéd waters of the wind,
The heart-strings of the throbbing harp begin
To long in aching music. . . .
Thus by accident were the words of Sir Thomas Browne, an author beloved
of Francis--words quoted by de Quincey--again made good: "And even
that tavern music, which makes one merry, another mad, in me strikes a
deep fit of devotion."
After requests for boots and writing-pads--walking and writing made up
his days--he gives notice that with many misgivings he has fixed on
Shelley for the theme of a first _Dublin Review_ article:--
"I have done so principally because I remember more of
him than any other poet (though that is saying little).
Coleridge was always my favourite poet; but I early
recognised that to make him a model was like trying to
run up a window-pane, or to make clotted cream out of
moonlight, or to pack jelly-fish in hampers. So that
until I was twenty-two Shelley was more studied by me
than anyone else. At the same time I am exposed to
the danger of talking platitudes, because so much has
been written about Shelley of late years which I have
never read. I may have one or two questions to ask you
in relation to the subject as I go on. Thank you for
the American paper. Only the poet feels complimented.
Your criticisms on the _Merry England_ article were
(for once in a way) entirely anticipated by my own
impressions. Happy are they that hear their detractions
and can put them to mending. With regard to what you
say about the advantage of my being in a more booky
place than Storrington[17] I entirely agree. Nor need
you fear the opium. I have learned the advantage of
being without it for mental exercise; and (still more
important) I have learned to bear my fits of depression
without it. Personally I no longer fear it."
In a later letter:--"Shelley was sent off yesterday.
Herewith the few fugitive verses I spoke of. With
regard to the article, please take no notice of any
writing on the backs of the sheets, and disregard all
pencilled writing, either front or back. The opening is
carefully constructed so that, if you think advisable,
you can detach it, and leave the article to commence on
page 10."
His next runs:--
"Surprised about Shelley. Seemed to me dreadful trash
when I read it over before sending it. Shut my eyes
and ran to the post, or some demon might have set me
to work on picking it again. Don't see but what we can
easily draw the knife out of your heart by knocking out
the praise of Swinburne. Won't grieve you if we leave
in the disparaging part of the comparison, I hope? And
I daresay you are perfectly right about it."
Of this Shelley article nearly the whole history is told in a long
letter to his own and his family's friend, Dr. Carroll:--
"The article on Shelley which you asked about I
finished at last, with quite agonising pain and
elaboration. It might have been written in tears, and
is proportionately dear to me. I fear, however, that
it will not be accepted, or accepted only with such
modifications as will go to my heart. It has not been
inserted in the current issue of the _Dublin_--a fact
which looks ominous. First, you see, I prefaced it by
a fiery attack on Catholic Philistinism (exemplified
in Canon T----, though I was not aware about him at
the time I wrote the article), driven home with all
the rhetoric which I could muster. That is pretty sure
to be a stumbling-block. I consulted Mr. Meynell as to
its suppression, but he said 'Leave it in.' I suspect
that he thoroughly agrees with it. Secondly, it is
written at an almost incessant level of poetic prose,
and seethes with imagery like my poetry itself. Now the
sober, ponderous, ecclesiastical _Dublin_ confronted
with poetic prose must be considerably scared. The
editor probably cannot make up his mind whether it
is heavenly rhetoric or infernal nonsense. And in the
midst of my vexation at feeling what a thankless waste
of labour it is, I cannot help a sardonic grin at his
conjectured perplexity. Mr. Meynell's opinion was
'"Shelley" is splendid.'. . .
"There can now be no doubt that the _Dublin Review_
has rejected my article. Nothing has been heard of it
since it was sent. I only hope that they have not lost
the MS. That would be to lose the picked fruit of three
painful months--a quite irreparable loss. I am not
surprised, myself. What is an unlucky ecclesiastical
editor to do when confronted with something so _sui
generis_ as this--my friend's favourite passage, and
the only one which I can remember. I had been talking
of the 'Cloud,' and remarking that it displayed 'the
childish faculty of make-believe, raised to the nth
power.' In fact, I said, Shelley was the child, still
at play, though his play-things were larger. Then I
burst into prose poetry. 'The universe is his box
of toys. He dabbles his hands in the sunset. He is
gold-dusty with tumbling amid the stars. He makes
bright mischief with the moon. He teases into growling
the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of
its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates
of heaven. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He
chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of
the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient
Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his
poetry.' The editor sees at once that here is something
such as he has never encountered before. Personally, I
recollect nothing like it in English prose. In French
prose I could point to something not so dissimilar--in
Victor Hugo. But not in English. De Quincey is as
boldly poetical, and his strain far higher; but he is
poetical after quite another style. The editor feels
himself out of his latitude. He is probably a person of
only average literary taste--that is, he can tell the
literary hawk from the literary handsaw when the wind
is southerly. He feels that discretion is the better
part of valour. The thing may be very good, may be very
bad. But it is beyond or below comprehension. So he
rejects it. Twelve years hence (if he live so long) he
will feel uncomfortable should anyone allude to that
rejection. Unless he has lost the MS. In that case the
thing is gone for ever.
"I had a commission (through Mr. Meynell) to write an
article for the jubilee number of the _Tablet_; but the
editor would have nothing to do with it when it was
written. I had said that Cardinal Wiseman too often
wrote like a brilliant schoolboy (I _might_ have said
that, as regards his style, he seldom wrote like anyone
else); and I had been guilty of other sins of omission
and commission which were likely to bristle the hair of
the Canon T----s."
And later, to the same correspondent:--
"_August._--I have been re-reading what I said
regarding my rejected Shelley article, and I see
that you might possibly interpret my language as
referring to its _merit_. This would make my words read
arrogantly in the extreme. When I said that I knew
nothing just like it in the language, I was speaking of
its _kind_, its style. As to the _merit_ of that style,
I have ventured no opinion of my own, but simply given
you my friends' opinion. I am so poor a judge of my own
work, that they never pay any attention to what I think
about it. Please always bear this in mind. You may be
sure that in speaking about my own work I always follow
the same rule, to tell you merely what my friends say
as to its merit."
What little more remains to be told of the writing and the posthumous
publication of the Shelley article comes from W. M.:--
"It happened that Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Vaughan,
who knew the poet's family well in Lancashire, and had
known Francis himself at Ushaw, met him in London at
our house, and out of this meeting and the Bishop's
wish to serve him, came the suggestion that he should
contribute a paper to the _Dublin Review_. That
venerable quarterly, founded by Cardinal Wiseman half
a century before, Bishop Vaughan now owned but did not
edit. It inherited ecclesiastical rather than literary
traditions; and a due consideration for these dictated
the opening passages of the Essay, since somewhat
curtailed. Hence proceeded the plea that Theology and
Literature might be reconciled--just such another
reconciliation as Art had been adjured to seal with
Nature at the end of the eighteenth century:
Go find her, kiss her, and be friends again!
And Thompson's plea had this added relevance--that the
choice of a subject, left to himself, had fallen upon
Shelley; perhaps a dubious choice. At any rate the
article was returned to him from the _Dublin_--one more
of those memorable rejections that go into the treasury
of all neglected writers' consolations, perhaps their
illusions. Thrown aside by its discouraged author, the
Essay[18] was found among his papers after his death.
His literary executor thought it right that the Review
for which it was originally designed should again have
the offer of it, since a new generation of readers
had arisen, and another editor, in days otherwise
regenerate. Thus it happened that this orphan among
Essays entered at last on a full inheritance of fame."
It appeared in the _Dublin_ dated July 1908, and for the first time
in a long life of seventy-two years the Review passed into a second
edition. Its reissue in separate form has for preface Mr. George
Wyndham's estimate of it as the most important contribution made to
English literature for twenty years.
* * * * *
From F. T. to W. M.:--
"The _Dublin_ article having been sent, I write to
ask you for more work, or directions as to work. I am
afraid, however, that even if there is room for it
the article will hardly be in time, and that through
my own fault. I miscalculated the date from Father
Driffield's letter, and seeing no newspapers, did
not discover my error till I came to post it. This
is something like a confession of failure, and I am
naturally chagrined about it. But I have one comfort
from the affair: I not only hope but think (though
until I see how I proceed with my next book I will not
speak decidedly) that it has broken me to harness. You
ask me to write frankly, and so I will tell you just
how I have found myself get on with my work. At first
I could not get on at all. I tried regularly enough
to settle myself to writing; but my brain would not
work. During the last four days I wrote at a pretty
uniform rate, and wrote so continuously as I have never
been able to write before--in fact, more continuously
than I mean to write again, except in an emergency
like this--I began to feel very shaken at the end of
it. But the valuable thing is that I was able to make
myself write when and for as long as I pleased. I want
some more work now, but if left to myself I may lose a
habit scarcely acquired. . . . The only two ideas in my
head both require books. The one is for an article on
Dryden, the other an old idea for an article on 'Idylls
of the King.' Very likely my idea with regard to the
latter has long been anticipated: so that to prevent
any possible waste of labour let me briefly explain
it. I have seen it objected to them that there are
only the slightest and most arbitrary narrative links
between them, and that they form no real sequence.
My idea is to show that they have not a narrative,
but a moral, sequence. (I have nothing to do with the
allegory.) Tennyson's idea has been to show the gradual
disruption of Arthur's court and realm through the
'little pitted speck in garnered fruit' of Guinevere's
sin, which 'rotting inward slowly moulders all.'
This he does by a series of separate pictures each
exhibiting in a progressive style the disintegrating
process. Each exhibits some definite development of
decaying virtue in court or kingdom. Viewed in this
light, they have a real relation to each other which is
that of their common relation to the central idea. It
is a _crescendo_ of moral laxity; and throughout, by
constant little side touches, he keeps before my mind
how all this is sprung from the daily visible sin of
the Queen's life. That is the idea: judge for yourself
if it is worth anything. If you have any work ready for
me, I should prefer to do that; I think I could now do
work not originated by myself."
He continues:--
"I gather from her last poem that Miss Tynan is no
longer with you, or I should have hardly sent you the
longer verses (the 'Sere of the Leaf'), for I feel
that I have taken a perhaps unwarrantable liberty in
apostrophising her, even in her poetical and therefore
public capacity. I can only plead that verse, like
'l'Amour' in Carmen's song--
est enfant de Bohème,
Qui n'a jamais, jamais connu de loi!
The thing would not write itself otherwise. She
happened to set the current of my thought, and I could
not quit the current."
Of this liberty Miss Tynan, one of the earliest of Francis's admiring
and admired, wrote to her poet:--
"I must thank you very much for associating my name
with your luxuriantly beautiful poem in the current
number (January 1891) of _Merry England_, and for
giving my words place on the golden and scarlet web
and woof of poetry. No one could fail to be proud and
grateful for such a distinction. I have been deeply
interested in your poetry since the first day I saw
your name to 'Dream Tryst.' I am sure I was one of the
first to write and ask, 'Who is Francis Thompson?'"
And again in 1892:--
" . . . You are too good to say you are indebted to me.
If I thought you were, I should begin to feel proud of
myself. I'd like to think better of my own work than I
do of some of my friends' work--Mr. Yeats is one, and
you are another--but I can't. My faculty of admiration
is too true and strong. . . . I hope you will write to
me again, and I look forward to meeting and knowing you
when I come to London. Your buying the 'Poppies' in
the circumstances was indeed a tribute. I am very glad
to know you are now lifted to a safer position, out of
danger of such poverty. I am very glad for you to be
the Meynells' friend." . . .
F. T. to W. M.:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--How good and kind and patient you
are with me! far more than I am with myself, for I am
often sick with the being that inhabits this villainous
mud-hut of a body. . . . I beguiled the four ill nights
I have spoken of, while the mental cloud was somewhat
lifted, by writing the verses [one set of these was
the 'Sere of the Leaf'] I herewith send you. If there
be no saving grace of poetry in them they are damned;
for I am painfully conscious that they display me, in
every respect, at my morally weakest. Indeed no one but
yourself--or, to be more accurate, yourselves--would
I have allowed to see them; for often verse written
as I write it is nothing less than a confessional far
more intimate than the sacerdotal one. _That_ touches
only your sins, and leaves in merciful darkness your
ignominious, if sinless, weaknesses. When the soul
goes forth, like Andersen's Emperor, thinking herself
clothed round with singing-robes, while in reality her
naked weakness is given defenceless to the visiting
wind, not every mother's son would you allow to gaze
on you at such a time. And the shorter of the two
pieces especially is such a self-revelation, I feel,
as even you have hardly had from me before. Something
in them may be explained to you, and perhaps a little
excused, by the newspaper cutting I forward. For some
inscrutable reason it has affected me as if I never
expected it. I knew of it beforehand; I thought I was
familiarised with the idea; yet when the newspaper
came as I sat at dinner, and I saw her name among so
many familiar names, I pushed away the remainder of my
dinner and--well, I will not say what I did. I have
been miserable ever since. The fact is my nerves want
taking up like an Atlantic cable, and recasing. I am
sometimes like a dispossessed hermit-crab, looking
about everywhere for a new shell, and quivering at
every touch. Figuratively speaking, if I prick my
finger I seem to feel it with my whole body." The shell
he had cast, with lamentations, was the encrustation of
disease, of opium, of street miseries.
In February 1890, having bidden good-bye at Storrington to Daisy "and
Daisy's sister-blossom or blossom-sister, Violet (there are nine
children in the family, the last four all flowers--Rose, Daisy, Lily,
and Violet)," he returned to London. In town the poetry was continued.
"Love in Dian's Lap" was written as he paced, in place of the Downs,
the library floor at Palace Court; and in Kensington Gardens, where
I have seen him at prayer as well as at poetry, he composed "Sister
Songs." Both were pencilled into penny exercise-books. His reiterated
"It's a penny exercise-book" is remembered by every member of the
household set to search for the mislaid first drafts of "Love in Dian's
Lap"--he himself too dismayed to look.
In this form "Sister Songs" (written at about the time of "The Hound of
Heaven," in 1891, but not published till 1895) was covertly handed as a
Christmas offering to his friends, or rather left with a note where it
would be seen by them:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--I leave with this on the
mantel-piece (in an exercise-book) the poem of which
I spoke. If intensity of labour could make it good,
good it would be. One way or the other, it will be an
effectual test of a theme on which I have never yet
written; if from it I have failed to draw poetry, then
I may as well take down my sign.--Always yours,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
Later, having recovered the manuscript to add to it the "Inscription"
he returned it with:--
"Before I talk of anything else, let me thank you _ab
imis medullis_ for the one happy Christmas I have had
for many a year. Herewith I send you my laggard poem.
I have been delayed partly through making some minor
corrections, but chiefly through having to transcribe
the 'Inscription' at the close of it."
He had watched the piling up of family presents before making his own,
and in the "Inscription" he tells:--
But one I marked who lingered still behind,
As for such souls no seemly gift had he:
He was not of their strain,
Nor worthy so bright beings to entertain,
Nor fit compeer for such high company;
Yet was he surely born to them in mind,
Their youngest nursling of the spirit's kind.
Last stole this one,
With timid glance, of watching eyes adread,
And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone;
And where the frail flower fell, it witheréd.
But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon;
As when a child, upstraining at your knees
Some fond and fancied nothings, says, "I give you these."
Of the first notion for this poem's title, "Amphicypellon," he wrote:--
"It refers to the αμφικυπελλον which Hephaestus,
in Homer, bears round to the gods when he acts as
cupbearer by way of joke. When Schliemann's things
from Troy were first exhibited at South Kensington,
I remember seeing among them a drinking-cup labelled
'Perhaps the _amphicypellon_ of Homer.' It was a
boat-shaped cup of plain gold, open at the top and
with a crescentic aperture at either extremity of the
rim, through which the wine could either be poured or
drunk. So that you could pour from either end, and (if
the cup were _brimmed_ with wine) two people could
have drunk from it at the same time, one at either
extremity. In a certain sense, therefore, it was a
double cup. And it had also two handles, one at either
of its boat-shaped sides, so that it was a two-handled
cup. You will see at once why I have applied the name
to my double poem."
Later this title was abandoned:--
"Let it be 'Sister Songs' as you suggest. But keep 'an
offering to two sisters' where it now is--on the title
page. 'Sister Songs' was my own first alteration of the
title, but was dropped I hardly know why."
One of his first articles after he left his always beloved Storrington
was the notice of General Booth's _In Darkest England_. Called
"Catholics in Darkest England," and signed "Francis Tancred," it
appeared in _Merry England_ for January 1891. Mr. Stead, in the _Review
of Reviews_, wrote:--
"Tancred sounds a bugle-blast which, it is hoped,
will ring through the Catholic ranks not only in
England, but in all Catholic Christendom. After
speaking highly of General Booth and his large,
daring, and comprehensive scheme, he points out that
it will of necessity lead to the proselytising of
neglected Catholics. He, therefore, cries aloud for
the creation of a Catholic Salvation Army, or rather,
for the utilisation of the Franciscans, Regulars and
Tertiaries, for the purpose of social salvation."
"Mr. Francis Tancred" received from Mr. Stead the following letter:--
"_January 12, 1891._
"DEAR SIR,--I beg to forward you herewith a copy
of the _Review of Reviews_, in which you will find
your admirable article quoted and briefly commented
upon. Permit me to say that I read your article with
sincere admiration and heartfelt sympathy, and that it
delighted the Salvation Army people at headquarters
more than anything that has appeared for a long time.
'That man can write said Bramwell Booth to me, and I
think he sincerely grudges your pen to the Catholic
Church.--I am, yours truly,
W. T. STEAD."[19]
Cardinal Manning[20] thereupon summoned Francis through my father, who
was the Cardinal's friend, and to this single meeting Francis alludes
in "To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster," a poem written, when, a year
later, 1892, Manning died. Of this, A. M. has written:--
"In 1892 his editor asked him for a poem on Cardinal
Manning, just dead, whom the poet had once visited;
surely never was a poem 'to order' so greatly and
originally inspired. I have alluded to days of deep
depression in Francis Thompson's life, and they
occurred now and then, with fairly cheerful intervals,
at this time. It was in the grief and terror of
such a day that he wrote 'To the dead Cardinal of
Westminster,' which is a poem rather on himself than
on the dead, an all but despairing presage of his own
decease, which, when sixteen years later it came,
brought no despair."
Claiming the ear of the dead, because the Cardinal asked the poet to go
often to him, he writes in a first version of the poem:--
I saw thee only once,
Although thy gentle tones
Said soft:--
"Come hither oft."
Therefore my spirit clings
Heaven's porter by the wings,
And holds
Its gated golds
Apart, with thee to press
A private business;
Whence
Deign me audience.
Your singer did not come
Back to that stern, bare home:[21]
He knew
Himself and you.
I saw, as seers do,
That you were even you;
And--why,
I too was I.
In that, as in "The Fallen Yew"--
"I take you to my inmost heart, my true!"
Ah fool! but there is one heart you
Shall never take him to!--
his theme is one that often pressed home upon him:--
"There is such goodwill to impart, and such goodwill to
receive, that each threatens to become the other, but
the law of individuality collects its secret strength;
you are you and I am I, and so we remain."
These concluding words are transcribed with a suppressed verse of "To
the Dead Cardinal of Westminster"--a verse suppressed, I imagine,
because its poetry was not approved rather than because it committed
its author to a too definite theory of Individualism. While he marks
the impenetrability of mind and mind, he writes hotly nevertheless of
the Political Economist's Individualism:--
"For diabolical this doctrine of Individualism is; it
is the outcome of the proud teaching which declares it
despicable for men to bow before their fellow-men. It
has meant, not that a man should be individual, but
that he should be independent. Now this I take to be an
altogether deadly lie. A man _should_ be individual,
but not independent. The very laws of Nature forbid
independence. . . . Independent, he puts forth no
influence; he is sterile as the sands of the desert.
For it is little less than an immutable ordinance
throughout the universe that without intercommunion
nothing is generated. The plant may reproduce on
itself, but if you would rise above mere vegetation, or
the lowest forms of animal life, there can be no true
hermaphroditism; aye, even in the realm of Mind, 'male
and female created He them.' There is but one thing
you can do for yourself; you can kill yourself. Though
you may try to live for yourself, you cannot, in any
permanence, live by yourself. You may rot by yourself,
if you will; but that is not doing, it is ceasing."
Afterwards he was to learn even more strictly from Patmore that the
unit of the world has two persons.
As in the realm of Mind, so in the Spiritual. What might seem the
culmination of secret Individualism, the Communion between Christ and
the Soul, is made universal in the Open Court of Catholicism. However
strict the segregation of Francis's spiritual experiences, they were,
save in some rare and awful moments of estrangement, offered to Christ,
through Christ to the Church, through the Church to the men from whose
intercourse he found himself debarred. Tolstoy's "every man in the
depths of his soul has something he alone comprehends, namely, his
attitude towards God" is a thought divinely expressed in the "Fallen
Yew," but it is only one aspect of the truth, as the single reflection
in a looking-glass is but a single aspect of the thing before it.
Second thoughts, like second mirrors, encircle and multiply the first
impression.[22]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] _Merry England_ was a magazine he had known in Manchester, and
noted especially during his Christmas holiday at home. His uncle,
Edward Healy Thompson, was already a contributor, and among others were
Cardinal Manning, Lionel Johnson, Hilaire Belloc, May Probyn, St. John
Adcock, Sir William Butler, Coulson Kernahan, Alice Corkran, Coventry
Patmore, W. H. Hudson, Katharine Tynan, J. G. Snead Cox, Aubrey de
Vere, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Father R. F. Clark, J. Eastwood Kidson, and
Bernard Whelan.
[16] He himself notes the circumstances of composition. "Mem.--'Ode to
Setting Sun' begun in the field of the Cross, and under shadow of the
Cross, at sunset; finished ascending and descending Jacob's Ladder (mid
or late noon?)" "The Song of the Hours" also was written at Storrington.
[17] The Shelley Essay bears signs of the booklessness of Storrington.
All the quotations were made from memory, and nearly all were
inaccurate.
[18] Also a Shelley "Selection," not published.
[19] There perished with Mr. Stead in the _Titanic_ disaster in 1912
a Catholic priest, who had, shortly before sailing, recommended "The
Hound of Heaven" (with the strangely significant line "Adown Titanic
glooms of chasméd fears") to a friend, as an antidote to decadent
poetry.
[20] At this time he met another Cardinal, then without his Hat, who
knew his people in Manchester. There were many pauses when the talk
turned to his home. Francis, untamable in shabbiness, even to the point
of rags, explained afterwards: "I did not like to dwell on the subject,
lest he should discover that I was in poor circumstances. You see he
corresponds with my father." But his father did, of course, already
know of his need. A letter, dated April 1892, from Bishop Carroll,
runs:--
"MY DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--Francis Thompson's father has agreed to give
me a small sum weekly (3_s._ 6_d._) for his son. I have consented to
forward it, and will do so monthly, adding a little myself. I now
enclose a cheque for 24_s._ It is not much, but it will help.--Ever
yours sincerely,
J. CARROLL."
[21] The old Archbishop's House in Carlisle Place.
[22] At this time he wrote to W. M. of an article in _Merry England_:--
"The Franciscan article is decidedly good. But I am getting a little
sick of this talk of 'individualism,' which only darkens counsel.
The writer seems to mean by it not at all what it means to me--and,
I think, to the Cardinal. What _he_ calls regulated individualism
many people would call Socialism. In fact, some Socialists claim the
Franciscans as a Catholic and religious experiment in the direction
of Socialism. It seems to me that you can juggle with words like
'individualism' to suit your own whims."